'Ted': A man and his bad-news bear

"Ted" pushed the limits with a womanizing, pot-smoking, booze-drinking bear as its title character.

Photo: Photo Credit: Universal Pictures

Which is weirder: a talking teddy bear huffing a bong, or a talking teddy bear wildly humping a grocery check-out girl on a pile of fresh produce?

Neither. It's the brutal, bugged-out fight scene in the later minutes of "Ted," when this same stuffed animal pounds Mark Wahlberg in the head with a vicious flurry of furry punches, slams him around the room and then whips his naked arse with a radio antenna. That has got to be one of the strangest things I have ever seen on film, and I've seen a lot.

"Ted" is the brainchild of Seth MacFarlane, the reigning sophomoric man-child behind Fox's animated "Family Guy." For his big-screen debut, MacFarlane directed, co-wrote and co-produced; in addition, he provides the voice of Ted, the bad-boy plush toy who does all the dirty deeds described above. For the record, he also looks like him. Same tall forehead, round face, button eyes. Eerie.

The engine driving the plot is Ted's friendship with John (Wahlberg), a kind if breathtakingly dopey Boston slacker, and the bear's tendency to screw up John's relationship with his perfect girlfriend, Lori (Mila Kunis). The movie does about what you'd expect from a three-wheeled romantic comedy with an extraneous horror subplot - which involves some creepy dancing by Giovanni Ribisi, and that's all you need to know - only it does so with a short, potty-mouthed, pot-smoking omnivore and an excess of flatulence. It is deeply juvenile and profoundly surreal.

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'Ted'

Rated R: for crude and sexual content, pervasive language and some drug use

Running time: 106 minutes

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The film also manages to throw in lots of cameos (excellent use of Ryan Reynolds!), pro-forma digs at current celebrities (Taylor Lautner) and such outmoded 1980 cultural references as "Flash Gordon" and an old jingle for Mounds and Almond Joy. It employs similar narrative "cutaways" and reflexively offensive gags (gays and blacks, rapes and "retards") as "Family Guy," which features a loquacious dog and baby. (For yet another talking sidekick, see "Wilfred," developed by former "Family Guy" showrunner David Zuckerman, about a depressed fellow who experiences his neighbor's dog as an Australian dude in a fuzzy suit.)

The opening sequence, narrated by a splendid, plummy Patrick Stewart, illustrates Ted's magical transformation from inanimate Christmas gift into John's best friend and "thunder buddy." And the older, perverted Ted cracks some of the more revoltingly funny lines of the year; I may never look at a parsnip the same way again.

But for all of its transgressive plush-toy sex and screw-'em humor, the plot is pretty standard stuff. Whether MacFarlane and his co-writers (Alec Sulkin and Wellesley Wild) are parodying conventions or merely exploiting them is hard to tell; fans will argue that MacFarlane's MO is far too irreverent and pop-savvy not to meet and mess with expectations. If the clichés are there - in the misty "I love you's" and emotional breakthroughs set to sniffling piano riffs - they're there for purposes of mockery, and mockery alone.

Could be. Or it could be that MacFarlane, in bringing his worldview to the big screen, just got lazy and lapsed into timeworn stereotypes. Weirder things have happened.